


No Circumstances Could Excuse

by dancinbutterfly



Series: Every Me and Every You [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, But it was basically the Red Room, CIA, Child Soldiers, Dissociation, Enemies to Lovers, Illya wants a soulmate just not this one, Ilya was not in the Red Room, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, It comes with a huge amount of trauma and baggage, KGB, M/M, Napoleon's just a kid from Brooklyn, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Past Torture, Past Underage Sex, Sex as a Weapon, Sexual Coercion, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Training Soviet Child Spies is Not Treated as a Joke in This Fic, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-18 04:27:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4692065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/pseuds/dancinbutterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When Ilya is eleven, his words appear. The soulmark spreads across his forearm from wrist to elbow in stark black Latin letters. His mother takes one look at it and bursts into tears. </i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Soulmate AU where the first words your soulmate are going to say to you appear on your body in the form of a permanent mark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the title comes from Placebo because in my heart its always 1998 and I'm saving the lyric "carve your name into my arm" for a different twist on the soulmate trope (why yes, I am already planning another soulmate au for them, so glad you asked). 
> 
> In this universe, your words are the first thing your soulmate says to you *directly*, not the first thing you hear them say.

When Ilya is eleven, his words appear. The soulmark spreads across his forearm from wrist to elbow in stark black Latin letters. His mother takes one look at it and bursts into tears. 

Then she disappears for two days and Ilya doesn't even know where to start looking until he gets a call from Yuri Menshov, a former associate of his father who insists that Ilya call him "Uncle Yuri" every time they speak even though they aren't related and Ilya knows that Menshov has been fucking his mother since before his father was taken away six months earlier. 

For once, he's actually happy to hear form the odorous grease-ball. At least he is until the man says, "She's fine, don't worry. She's with me." This, of course, makes him worry more about her because Yuri has access to cocaine and heroin through his blackmarket contacts. She always comes back stumbling and incoherent after she sees Yuri. It makes his hands shake with fury.

When she sobers up, she takes him to have his words registered with the Ministry of Soulmates, just like any good Soviet citizen. When the plump woman behind the desk calls in a translator, who reads his words to him in Russian, Ilya thinks that maybe his mother wasn't crying because it was in English after all. 

Funny, because he didn't know she could speak English before then. His mother the intellectual. It's even stranger to wrap his mind around than the soulmark. 

Then Menshov recommends him to a youth military training program, away from his mother, and Ilya is suddenly too busy to think about anything but the work. The episodes when he breaks - loses control, loses himself - are corrected and he moves forward. 

Everything is going well until after the division of East and West Germany. The records of his words are recalled, English words, the language of the capitalist enemy, and his superiors almost pull him from active duty, decommission him and send him back to Russia but Oleg stops them. He's too talented, too good at his job, spent too many years training and practicing. 

He will not go waste because his soulmate will speak to him for the first time in English. 

Country over self is one of the credos of the Soviet Union. Children are taught this in school. Ilya learned it as a child just like everyone else. The good of the many is more important the good of the few or, more importantly, the one. 

That was why same-sex soulmate couples were supposed to find other pairs of the opposite sex to marry, because the state needed more children. It was why a soulmate bond didn't exempt a person from military service like it did in some countries. It was why people were supposed to turn in all insurrectionists, even if they were soulmates. 

Communism wasn't about one person's happiness the way capitalism was. It was about the welfare of the entire nation. Having a partner meant for you didn't exempt a person from that responsibility. Stalin's scientists in the thirties had even posited that the soulmate phenomenon proved that human beings were supposed to take care of each other on a biopsychosocial level. 

Oleg knew that Ilya understood this. He knew Ilya well enough to know that he would not be compromised. So he stays in the KGB. He remains in the West.

Sometimes, though, only at night and only when he is alone, Ilya will trace the words with his fingertip. He would wonder who it was, what they looked like, what they sounded like, how they would feel in his arms. Not often, of course, but sometimes. He wonders what he did wrong in this life to get _I'm sure you understand humiliation better than most_ as his words. As if the fact that the words happened to be true weren't bad enough. 

~*~*~

Napoleon joins the starts teaching himself to pick pockets when his soulmark comes in at thirteen. _Obviously I've been briefed about you your corrupt criminal background_ is not the most common soulmark a person could have and he wants to live up to his side of the prediction. 

As a child he always liked the romance of soulmarks. His parents' had said _Get off my fire escape you punk_ and _As you wish my lady_. Growing up, the fairytale of his old man accidentally breaking into the tiny tenement his mother shared with her two sisters in attempt to reach his friend's rooms a story above was his favorite bedtime story. It took them less than a month to go from strangers to newlyweds. 

He finds it a little less romantic in the summer of '44 when she wakes up screaming about not being able to breathe, suffocating, drowning. Three days later she gets a telegram from the Navy, telling her his father's ship was gone down in the South Pacific, that they were sorry for her loss but that he died serving his country with honor. Napoleon doesn't think the way his mother goes dead around the eyes is so romantic anymore. The way she either doesn't sleep or sleeps all the time isn't a fairytale. 

Honestly, he joins the Army as soon as he turns sixteen, lying about his age on his forms, to get away from her more than any loyalty to country or belief in the good fight. It probably makes him a bad person and a worse son but he just can't take it. His memory of her happiness is to clear to bear the devastation of what losing his father has done to her. When the war ends, he writes home, but he doesn't go back.

Europe is good to him. The place is a disaster in the wake of the war but it's a great place to hone the skills he started to cultivating as a teenager. Of course over time, a little pickpocketing escalates to a lot of art-theivery and safe-cracking and, well. No one's ever accused him of knowing when to say when.

He's actually a little excited when he gets busted trying to lift that Vermeer in Rochester. After all, it's one thing to be wanted by Interpol, it's another to have an actual criminal background, one that a person could be briefed on. Then he's staring down the barrel of fifteen years in an eight-by-six and suddenly the whole thing is a little less thrilling.

"The CIA can offer a man with your skill set quite a few opportunities," Sanders tells him. "I'm sure you'd enjoy working with us much more than rotting away in Rikers."

"Sounds fine bye me," Napoleon says. "When do we start?"

Sanders looks shocked as if he expected Napoleon to protest, though why would he? He chafes hard at being controlled and on any given day he'd rather be left to his own devices but honestly, he's not really doing anything more important at the moment. It's not like the Vermeer is going anywhere. 

Hell, through all the legal rigamarole no one has even mentioned his numbered accounts and tax shelters in Switzerland, China, Panama, and Saudi Arabia. If they knew about them, they would've threatened him with the knowledge which means that most of his millions are still safely tucked away from Sanders and his minions. So, he has money. A lot of money. Enough money that eventually, his thefts had stopped being about about profit and started being about the game. 

So this is just a new game to Napoleon. And he likes games. That's why he works to become the best, not out of loyalty or patriotic duty or even distaste over being forced into the position but because he is likes games and he always plays to win.

After he becomes an agent, he only thinks of the words scrawled his hip when he calls his mother. She asks him what he's doing and he lies and he asks her how she is and she lies right back. Sometimes she'll heave a little sigh that is so hopeless it makes his chest feel like its cracking open. After each of these calls, immediately after they hang up and his mother goes back to the empty life that she refuses to rebuild no matter how much money he sends her or how many times he visits, that maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he and his soulmate never met at all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ilya spends a little too much time thinking about his past after he meets his soulmate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god warnings because this fic just got DARK. Feel free to wait until the next chapter to pick up again because this chapter can be skipped without losing much plot, however things are revealed in this chapter may be referenced later.
> 
> Warnings: This fic focuses on Ilya's time training to be a spy which was basically from age 11 to 16 so all sexual activity that took place during this time can be considered underage. Some of it consensual, some of it is not but none of it takes place on-screen. In addition this chapter deals with (whoo boy here we go), torture, murder, and the Soviet system blatantly enabling a child-abuser to get away with his crime over a prolonged period, mentions of sexual training and mentions of those "psychotic episodes" in the form or lost time and uncontrolled rages.
> 
> Read with your self-care in mind. 
> 
> For more specific warnings with basically all the spoiler, check the end notes.

Ilya flips the table when his bastard of a soulmate starts talking about his mother. His hands don't stop shaking until he's walked a kilometer into the city. 

He finds himself in a bar for the sake of something to do more than anything else. He downs his beer like its water and the bartender smiles at her. It's flirtatious but Ilya ignores her, staring down at the lable on the bottle so hard the letters swim before his eyes and he finds himself, somehow, back in the USSR, feeling trapped and powerless all over again. 

Menshov hadn't wanted Ilya used up on intimate espionage so never he went through standard training usually required for the weaponization of sex. Menshov preferred to give that sort of instruction on a more personal level, when he visited Ilya with letters from his mother. It started two weeks after he began the program. Menshov had arrived in full dress uniform and the two of them were ushered into a private room "to talk." Occasionally over the years Menshov would bring along a friend or two, or invite a few of the trainers to join them. Ilya did as he was told like a good soldier and after, Menshov always took his letters back to his mother, unopened.

He viciously separated sex from emotion but it would have been easier to learn the way the others had, through the standard training sessions. At least his classmates knew there was a curriculum, that there was a true purpose, and that some day it would end. None of the boys or girls who disappeared to hone their erotic skills got caught losing hours time from his memory or going blind with rages that always end with him in a straight-jacket in a small, locked room. 

They would simply disappear for six months or so and return changed from simple soldiers into something like human mercury - slippery, languid, and beautiful. 

He admired them, if he were honest. They were ruthless with their skills when they returned and soon held the secrets of all their classmates. He fell prey to two before he became a KGB agent.

The first was a boy named Alexei when he was fourteen and desperate for any kind touch almost three years in the program. Alexei was one of the few candidates who had not seemed intimidated by his political connections and he seemed to listen when Ilya told him about his nightmares, weathered hands reaching out for him and the sound of his mother crying. 

He'd been hauled in for a reprimand about the importance of keeping secrets two days. The conversation ended in a public beating administered by Alexei himself in front of his fellow trainees. They gave Alexei a lead pipe. The other boy nearly took out his eye before Ilya worked himself free of his restraints and broke Alexei's neck.

His trainers weren't expecting that and though they had seemed pleased. "You must exercise restraint, Kuryakin. It's always a shame to unnecessarily lose a useful asset. Next time, ask permission before you kill a comrade."

After they hauled Alexei's body away, the cut by his eye received stitches that did little to stop the scarring and his training was escalated immediately, starting with interrogation resistance techniques. What followed was a period of time he doesn't choose to remember. It's mostly concrete rooms and the sound of his own voice screaming. The lost time and uncontrollable rages faded with his hoarse voice. It ended eventually and even now, Ilya is sure he is stronger for it. 

In a way, he's even grateful. He knows now how to keep from breaking and he can spot a seduction at fifty paces. Useful skills both.

That hadn't saved him from Maksim. He was a soft spoken young man with huge brown eyes and nearly unparalleled knife skills. He and Maksim had been teamed together countless times over the years but the winter they both turned sixteen found them had been stranded near the Chinese border. They were alone and cold and it was the first time Ilya had truly felt like he was free from watchful eyes. He had known exactly what Maksim was but he had let him have him anyway. He was soft and gentle and when Maksim touched him, it didn't hurt. He had enjoyed every moment they spent together on the Soviet bank of the frozen Ussuri River for the three days before they were finally retrieved. 

Afterwards, Ilya had met Oleg for the first time at a debriefing that began with the words, "Why don't you tell me more about Yuri Menshov. He's been to visit you a few times since you began our program, hasn't he?" He left that briefing with his official KGB posting and a handler who was building his name taking down counter-revolutionaries inside the government. 

He heard, a few years ago, that someone had found Menshov behind one of the barracks in his prison camp with the skin literally peeled from his skull, layer by layer, like an onion, left hanging attached in strips at the neck. The report says that no one heard him screaming but he must have. That type of meticulous work takes hours. He must have screamed and screamed.

As far as he knows, Maksim is still an active operative. He hasn't seen him since they left the Ussuri but he knows it was him. No one can work a blade like Maksim. 

But no, he couldn't have Maksim as his soulmate. Of course he isn't the type destined for a gorgeous, talented compatriot who gave him the greatest gift he's ever received in his short, painful life. That would be too easy. 

He has Napoleon Solo, CIA agent and enemy of the state. He has another man in his life who is sure to fail him or betray him or both and more and that's who the universe has tied his soul to. It would just figure for his life, wouldn't it? 

He slams his fist down on the bar and grits his teeth. He gives himself a moment to think how unfair this is but then his life has never been fair. He doesn't expect that to change now. 

He doesn't expect anything to change now. He is who he is and he has work to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SPECIFIC WARNINGS:  
>  **Child abuse:** Pretty much everything the USSR does in this fic to their trainees are at least one form child abuse if not many. They condition them to fight and to kill, targets and each other. That's just...so abusive. I consider everything that happens therein to be child abuse so I'm warning for it all because the very idea of what is possible in a situation like a "child spy school" is so morally dubious I can hardly stand it.  
>  **Non-con:** A friend of Ilya's father and high ranking party official regularly visits the training facility and sexually abuses him, with the full complicity of the facility. This is not graphically depicted but does effect pretty much everything.  
>  **Underage:** Ilya sleeps with two other trainees, both of whom are also adolescents at the time. Neither is not graphically depicted.  
>  **Violence:** Ilya is punished for not keeping secrets. He is beaten by the trainee he slept with who he eventually kills. Ilya is tortured as a form of counter-intelligence training. Also, the guy who was abusing Ilya gets killed.  
>  **Brief mention of Ilya's psychotic episodes:** Expressed herein as lost time and rage blackouts because I seriously don't buy that he's psychotic, yall, I just don't. I think he's justifiably angry and traumatized. There's a difference.  
>  **Sexual training:** Some of the young spy trainees are trained in sexual espionage. That's it. That's about as graphic as it gets in the fic too.
> 
> I think that's everything. If you still want to read it, I hope you like it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> School is insanely busy and I start my internship this week so I have no idea when I'll get to update this so I wanted to post this while I had the chance.

Unrequited soulmates do happen. It's rare, the motivation behind tragic self-sacrifices since the dawn of time. Poor Eponine in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables was Napoleon's favorite victim of a one-way soulbond. He just never considered the possibility that he could end up like her.

After all, what kind of soulmate says the kind of things Ilya said to him when they first met. He would have stopped Napoleon from talking the first words out of his mouth if it were requited wouldn't he? He would have said something. He wouldn't have let Napoleon keep talking if his words were Ilya's words. 

Instead he had flipped the table. He had walked away. A soulmate would have stayed wouldn't he? Napoleon needled but he had stayed. 

Of course, Ilya is Napoleon's soulmate. One way or reciprocal, he has no doubt after that first meeting. 

Napoleon is impressed by Ilya Kuryakin, of course, he is. The man successfully tailed him through the entirety of East Berlin and then tore the trunk off a car after all, using nothing but brute force. Both are feats that take considerable doing. 

He's also attracted to Ilya Kuryakin, but, again, of course, he is. The man is a six-and-a-half-foot tall golden god with impossible blue eyes and a deliciously full mouth. Not being attracted to him would be scientifically impossible. He's sure there are Soviet scientists in a bunker testing that exact thing at this very moment. 

These are both perfectly acceptable reactions. Napoleon knows how to respect the skills of his fellow human beings, even if they're the enemy and he's used to being attracted to dangerous people. He has a type. It's not by any measure of the word tame. 

What isn't acceptable is the way the Red Peril makes him feel. Which is everything. All the damn time. 

He stooped to insulting the man's mother. He bickered with him over handbags and belts of all things. He is a better man that. Isn't he? He's sure he is. Or he was before Ilya showed up. Now he's not so sure. 

After they rendezvous in Rome, he finds himself fucking the lovely concierge simply because because he can. She isn't his usual type, a little too soft around the edges, but she isn't Ilya. That's enough. She isn't Ilya and after the night he just had, watching Ilya touch walk arm and arm with the lovely Gaby Teller like he likely will never be able to with his own soulmate, whose mother he insulted like an incredible idiot, that is more than enough. 

While his lovely bedmate sleeps the sated sleep of the thoroughly pleasured, he jealously listens to Gaby and Ilya dance and wrestle in the room below and realizes that he's going crazy. That's whats happening. Quietly yes, but still. 

He's utterly losing his typically firm grasp on his sanity because the next morning he's charmed by all the bugs he finds in his room. It means his soulmate is a compent, cunning agent with the ability to get his job done without Napoleon realizing until its a little too late. Illya challenges him and Napoleon loves a challenge. 

That must be why he comments on the bowtie. It has to be because he honestly finds it quite cute. Adorable really. He wants to untie it and use it to pull the man down for a kiss. 

It takes absolutely everything in him not to preen when sees that Ilya's changed his tie. It gives him hope. Maybe he feels something to. Maybe the pull isn't one way. 

Then he sees Victoria Vinciguerra in person and dear god she is an Amazon made flesh. She is straight out of his childhood fantasizes, a vision off the catwalks of Milan. He wants her with an animal desire that is enough to distract him from the way Ilya looks at Gaby, the way he changed his tie simple because of a few words, the way he refuses to meet Napoleon's eyes as anything more than a glare. 

The whole encounter just feels…good. It gives him a chance to be himself again, flex his sticky fingers. His joy is genuine as he lifts picks pockets and steals jewelry. He gained these skills for Ilya. Practicing them with him so close is heady. He knows that's the soulbond, the mythical connection that everyone who found their partner raved about, the one that caused people in terrible situations to stay despite all better situation. 

He wonders, as he makes his way back to the hotel afterwards, if Ilya is feeling it too. It's possible he's not. Napoleon hopes he is. 

Gaby presence provides a much needed diffusion of his tension. She isn't impressed by either of them, particularly Ilya, who has locked himself in the bathroom with his camera. Napoleon knows that she sees more than Ilya gives her credit for, but he doesn't know exactly how much. He doesn't know if she can see his want when Ilya sticks his head out of the make-shift darkroom, illumiated by a red glow. He doesn't think so. He's fairly practiced at schooling his expressions, keeping his cool. Still, he feels obvious with want so maybe she can. It's hard to tell with her. She's hiding secrets of her own, though he doesn't know what. 

Her presence alone is not enough to calm him so that is probably why he skives off the the Vinciguerra compound on his own. He's got all this excess energy to work off, frustration and desire are escalating the closer he is to Ilya so going seems like the best course of action.

Natural, Ilya is there. Napoleon doesn't know why he's surprised. He shouldn't be. 

He shouldn't be surprised Ilya has better tools than he does. He shouldn't be surprised by anything where Ilya is concerned but he is. Ilya spends the whole night shattering his expectations. And that little trick with the guard, the Kiss he called it? Napoleon wanted to pin him to one of those lockers right then and there. He'd never seen anything like that before and it was sexy as hell. 

Getting thrown from a boat is less sexy. Watching his soulmate nearly drown even less so. He works to convince himself that it's all fine, all normal, as he sets aside the ridiculous sandwich and drives into the water to save the man he’s already starting to think of as his Russian from drowning. He doesn’t manage to delude himself. Being alone or unrequited he’s sure he could manage but he doesn’t think he could bear it if Ilya died the same way as his father. His heart starts does’t start beating again until Ilya gasps for air in his arms. 

He honestly doesn’t know how much more of this he can take and they’re just getting started.


End file.
